El Movemiento

Education, and Colorado in The Movement

Fig. 3. Denver Chicano Liberation in Escuela Yearbook (cropped portion of original image). 1973. Courtesy of the Denver Public Library, Western History Collection, [WH1971].

Colorado Education and Mexican Americans

After the American War with Mexico in the 1840s, schools were an important first step of building white American colonizing communities in Colorado. Mexicans and Hispanos have called Colorado home for hundreds of years, but they were sidelined in society by their new white neighbors through segregated and low quality schooling.

In the early twentieth century, the segregated education funneled Mexicans and Hispanos to work as manual laborers in sugar beet fields and growing cities like Denver. In their textbooks and class lessons, teachers taught a history of Colorado that overlooked the role that Mexicans and Hispanos had in building the state.

These factors made the perfect storm for Mexican and Hispano activists—called Chicanes—to fight for civil rights. Education was a major part of this movement.

What is El Movimiento?

From as early as the 1940s, Chicanes across the Western United States organized to improve the lives of their communities. Through labor strikes, boycotting, marches, and school walkouts, the peak of this activism was in the late 1960s and the early 1970s. It is known by many names, such as The Mexican Civil Rights Movement, the Chicane Movement, as well as El Movimiento by Spanish speakers.

Oftentimes, people remember El Movimiento in Texas and California, however, Denver, Colorado influenced those places, and impacted El Movimiento overall.

Click the image for a reading of Gonzales' ground breaking poem "I am Joaquin / Yo Soy Joaquin," a poem that was profoundly influential to Chicane activist thought!

Fig. 4. Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzales. c. 1970. Denver, CO. The Denver Post. Accessed Feb. 18, 2023.

Fig. 5. Flag of La Raza Unida Party. May 9, 2021. Wikimedia Commons Ac. Accessed Mar. 4, 2023.

Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzales

Gonzales was born and raised in Colorado, and graduated from Manual High School, a public high school in Denver. He became famous as a boxer, but shifted to politics, helping to campaign to elect John F. Kennedy in 1962.

Gonzales would leave the Democratic Party, but he continued to work in politics, founding the Crusade for Justice in 1966. Gonzales was also a poet, writing some of the most influential poems of El Movimiento. His ideas, political background, and leadership made him a deeply respected organizer of the El Movimiento.

Gonzales' view of education as a major problem facing Mexican Americans is not always emphasized by scholars. In fact, education was so important that it would define many of the biggest successes of his organization.

The Crusade for Justice

The Crusade for Justice was an activist organization operating in Denver, CO, which worked to uplift Mexican American people. Whileany of the key figures were part of the Gonzales family, the Crusade was successful because of its support from the Chicane community throughout Colorado.

The Crusade believed that there was no problem they could not fix themselves. They did not feel represented in politics, so they created La Raza Unida Party in 1970. They felt Chicane news was not well represented by newspapers, so they created their own publication, El Gallo in 1967.

The Crusade's biggest success was the Chicano Youth Liberation Conference, where Chicane students from across the Southwest met in Denver to unify their mission. Together, they created “El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán,” which declared the Southwest as the original home of their Aztec ancestors, which they called Aztlán. In the Plan, they identified several goals to reclaim Aztlán, with education being one of them.

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